It looks like we might be entering the final week(s) of (at least) this year's legislative push on health care reform.

Thursday brought us legislative text of the amendments to the Senate bill that the House will take up through the reconciliation process as well as an updated CBO score of the whole package. It is likely the House will vote on the bill package Sunday. If they do so, the Senate bill will become the law of the land, and the reconciliation amendments will then have to make it though the Senate before those become law.

Perhaps the most difficult policy question Concord has been discussing with the public, the media, and members of Congress, is what to do about current large budget deficits given the lingering effect of a deep recession and projections for future debt levels due to population aging and rising health care costs. Does working on one problem preclude working on the other? The answer is no.

As the White House and congressional leaders rethink health care reform after the Republican upset in the Massachusetts Senate race, there is a growing danger that Congress will jettison comprehensive health care reform altogether. Even worse, they might pass stripped-down measures that eliminate politically difficult cost-containment, while popular but costly provisions are kept.

When we finished our issue brief on the health care reform "endgame" before the holidays, we had a difficult time trying to isolate the key 10-year costs and savings of different components of the legislation. Now that we have had a bit more time with the final House and Senate versions of the legislation and the CBO analyses, we wanted to present the following table: